As reported by The Register over a week ago, Siemens looks to unload UK chip plant, US wireless communications chip maker Atmel has agreed to take over Siemen's North Tyneside chip plant, mothballed since 1998.

There's trouble brewing when American market researchers make pronouncements about the behaviour of Europan Internet markets without having any real appreciation of the cultural issues. There's still a great tendency for them to regard Europe as one market, when in reality multilingual countries like Belgium and Switzerland effectively have several markets. Nor for that matter is it at all logical to make EMEA - Europe, the Middle East and Africa - into a single region: it's about as daft as combining Cuba and Connecticut.

Strange goings on in an online operating system poll run by Microsoft partner MSNBC have raised the ire of Linux Today, which has questioned the strange way in which Win2k/ME surged into the top slot on Saturday, with a surprise 50,000 votes in favour, or thereabouts. As Kevin Reichard says in an email to MSNBC, "It strains creduility that 50,000 votes were tallied SOLELY for Microsoft 2000/ME on a Saturday morning."

We knew that Internet access was a big issue but BT has highlighted the detrimental effects it can have on your health. The inability to control your own sphincters is usually a sign of rabid old age, total fear or heavy intoxication. We're not entirely sure which category BT's Net package Surftime fits into, but then that's hardly likely to bother you if sitting at a PC causes you to soil yourself.

It's a bit humbling when something as complex and subtle as the H-1B Visa debate sparks off a mailbag that takes the argument into ever more complex and subtle territory. But you've done that this week, and your reaction to the reappearance of the American engineer's worst friend Norman Matloff covered seasoned opinion from US veterans to fresh-faced H-1B applicants. We're publishing a representative sample below.

Tom's page focuses it attention on the world of integrated mainboard chipsets today. Warming up with a pitched battle between the new Aladdin TNT2 and the i815e, this also looks at the rest of a crowded field. Go here for all the gory details.

The personal laptop of Qualcomm CEO Irwin Jacobs has been nicked from a hotel conference room just after a briefing with business journalists. The laptop, which appears to have no better security than a simple password and was said to contain a number of valuable company secrets, was left on an adjacent table for 15 to 20 minutes while Jacobs spoke to a small group of journos.

Blimey. We've been emailed from the creators of a new site, imaginatively called BTHateWorld in response to the telco giant's Internet service BTOpenWorld. Now, we at The Reg are the first to point out BT's abject failure to do anything that doesn't make it instant money while also not allowing anyone else to compete effectively.

IBM is among a range of other "global brands" to have gone completely insane and paid for the privilege of removing competitors from the confines of the Sydney Olympics. In the good old days, corporate sponsoring consisted of billboards and logos on tickets etc etc but now where money is more important than anything else (this is the Olympics for chrissakes), sponsors are asked (and happily pay) to cough up more cash to have competitors removed.

Nottingham has become the first city council to buy laptops for all its school kids. Not that they will be giving them away, but leasing them at around a tenner a week, with contributions coming from schools, parents and local businesses.

Last Thursday, little bits of information started slipping out that the FCC was demanding AOL open up its instant messaging software as a precursor to allowing the Time Warner merger to go through. We were glad of it, not only because that without this measure AOL/Time Warner would be just too powerful but also because the FCC wasn't being pushed around.

Register reader Mike Koper alerted us to a security flaw in cellular service provider Nextel Communications' on-line Account Manager Friday which would have enabled users to access other customers' account details.